Meetings WCA tech staff & E-Learning Strategy Group

Had two good productive meetings today with some Wimbledon technical staff and the UAL E-Learning Strategy Group, I find it really beneficial to physically meet up and have ‘real’ conversations. This could be a basic requirement of DIAL project approach and also the community groups approach, maybe hold a number of formal and informal debate sessions as part of the project development. Really important not get too lost or entrenched in just using ‘online’ for everything? See the learning Studio – http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/discipline/research-practice/learning-studio

There’s a a few extra things to think about that came out of todays discussion:

We need to manage expectations, what this project can achieve, what we’d like to to acchive.

Make clear groups can be experimental in approach and scope.

Make sure groups develop an independent outlook from the start and input and support the larger DIAL community.

Make clear what incentives and support DIAL can provide.

Start debate about the potential platform DIAL will provide and how this will look and function, define what this will do and not do how it will work. How it fits in to the larger UAL digital landscape.

Baselining needs to start ASAP

We’re keen to get the 5 pilot communities started ASAP, so those who are ready can go for it, we only have two confirmed groups at this stage please see below theres 3 groups currently thinking about forming. The OER group may sit on the parameter so wont be classed as one of the 5 (its another experiment group for the pilot).

We need the interested groups to now officially declare an interest and kick off the group would you please add a post/s ASAP on the DIAL blog as have the other two declaring what the group may address and bring to the project?

Possible groups (communities) under consideration by group members (these groups are thinking about forming)
A video resource development community (e.g. instructional video)
An online presentation skills community (e.g. talking to camera, wimba meetings)
Mobile device use and development (Please change inline with your ideas)

Alternative embed experiment comunity
An Open Educational Resources use and reuse community

Preparing the groups:

Just short sound bites at this stage (be good to try and grow this community spread the load) … as with all these pilot communities in terms of evaluating impact they could benefit from a dual approach – acknowledge the big picture/problems/context and then provide a real would example that illustrates someone at the start of this journey and the impact the community pilot project has on them and others over the 3 month pilot which hopeful sparks wider debate and new and associated communities of practice ?

Please Write or record your goals – what you want to achieve (what you need to do and why)

Could you have a think about what your thoughts are at the moment – so would be good to get a picture of your situation and how this relates to others in same position (a story) could you note down, (write it down or make audio recording, video diary), What you do, what you think about digital resources in learning and teaching, why are you involved creating digital resources, what are your strengths and weaknesses, and fears. (this info will help us baseline ‘where we are at the moment’ a lot of people are in your situation)

We would be looking at putting this info online in some form as part of the bigger resource for others to learn from experience, we could make it anonymous if you wanted to.

With this info we can then plan the best approach to take (that’s where DIAL come in) we’ll work with you to help create your ‘community group resources’ but also create a bunch of supplementary resources and hopefully a bigger support community of other people who are at the a mixture of wanting guidance or who can provide guidance (like Philip white and lots of other individuals across ual)